Ouled Ahmed

Special from the Maghreb

A recent issue of the pan-African literary magazine Chimurenga reminded us that "The Sahara is Not a Boundary." The 4th volume of the Poems for the Millennium project, on North African poetry, is one marvelous collection of work. This week the African poetry commentary series roars back to life with a wonderful guest post by scholar and translator Brahim El Guabli introducing one of Tunisia's most daring poets, Mohamed Saghir Ouled Ahmed. If Pierre Joris and Habib Tengour have whetted your appetite, here's a chance to discover another voice from the Maghreb.

Poetics of Sedition in the Maghreb: Mohamed Sghir Ouled Ahmed

Mohamed Saghir Ouled Ahmed (b. 1955) is probably Tunisia's most prominent Arabic poet today. His birth in the southern city of Sidi Bouzid, which was the breeding ground of the December 2010 Tunisian Revolution, further consecrated his status as Tunisia's contemporary, “conscience of the nation.” During his long career, which he began at the age of fourteen, Ouled Ahmed produced at least five collections of poetry: The Rhapsody of the Six Days (1988), But I Am Ahmad (1989), I Have No Problem (1989), The South of the Water (1991) and The Will (2000).

Artifice and interface

We live in machines but are not machines. Restless forms imagine new presents, where past and future meet. As becoming-digital beings, we retain and engage the problem of embodiment, which needs a world, needs other forms, needs to die. Death is our stake: neither early nor late.

Postscript // Bibliography // Acknowledgments

T.1 The poem is ontologically dissevering: necessarily fragmenting and framentary.

T.2 Holding concretized, ready-made “significance” and in abeyance, the poem functions as a catch, an apparatus used to observe the manifestations and codeterminations of entangling and unfurling world(s).

T.3 So as to render inoperative those ossified subject-configurations most exploitable by market vampirism, the poem tears back the veil of the “real” (where flesh meets fluorescence: body/world) to point to the rachitic frame-structure bolstering becoming.

In order to celebrate the conclusion of “Prolegomena to (Any Future) Process Poetics,” I’d like to provide a postscript that distills the central concerns of these twelve dense riffs into a series of pointed propositions. The following twenty theses comprise the core of this thinking and will act (I hope) as a lens for future rereading. Thank you, dear readers, for engaging with/in this work.